Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (review)

This is a marvellous book. Harking to the sonorous musical bodies of the Middle Ages, Bruce Holsinger addresses 'an intangible and perhaps unlikely object of historical enquiry', through a remarkable amalgam of cultural-materialist analyses in literary criticism and musicology, even while making, as well, a sophisticated contribution to queer studies.

The performativity of music, musical embodiment, is central. 'For a civilisation ever alert to the perils of carnality, the human body represents nevertheless the very ground of musical experience. Music [may] effectively erase sensual and epistemological boundaries between sexual and other modes of experience in the flesh' (pp. 1, 10). Holsinger develops important affinities between the musical speculations of the classical world and patristic discourse on music and corporeality, as 'Latin Christendom struggled to reconcile the sublimating aspirations of classical musical thought with its own incarnational aesthetic.' Thus, '[t]he legacy of patristic theology to the musical cultures of the Middle Ages was a musical worldview not uniformly hostile to the body, but rather deeply aware of the musicality of human flesh.' Augustine's later writings, in particular, display a 'surprisingly materialist construction of music's role in the creation, vivification and resurrection of human bodies' (p. 21).

Holsinger's close readings are brilliantly and exquisitely done, in Latin and English literature and in music (notably Hildegard's), and also for medieval visual culture: the Guidonean hand, Hildegard, the panel from Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' reproduced on the cover. About Hildegard much, of course, has been written in the past decade. Holsinger develops an analysis of the constructions of corporeality and the sexual body, in her medical writings and letters, into a reading of musico-poetic imagery in the visionary texts and songs. The result is a sense of female spirituality expressive of homoerotic desire, within the Marian devotional music of an all-female monastic culture. In this way, Hildegard's range of talents and passions achieves a new synthesis, expanding our reading of her to include a place in the history of 'lesbian-like' identities.

The centre of the book and its nexus of issues is a fascinating enquiry into circumstances surrounding the liturgical music of twelfth century Paris. As the Notre Dame school emerged to become the origin of polyphonic music in the west, so Holsinger claims that the new polyphony, attacked with polemical invective for its aberrancy and discord, was at the same time read as – and vilified for – parallelling and imaging the sexual dissidences of homoeroticism. The sensate connections of the new polyphony offend the ordered canons of musical orthodoxy just as much as same-sex bodily connection offends hetero-normalcy. In endorsing this claim, Holsinger presents a further analysis of his work on the otherwise hitherto neglected erotic verse-epistles of the poet Leoninus. Holsinger identifies this Leoninus with the Leonin of the Notre Dame school, and thus with the 'musical homoerotics of polyphony' (pp. 21-2). Musical and theological figures of significance from the twelfth century are again seen as formative, now in an emerging history of homoeroticism. For those of us in Engl. Lit., the chapter on 'Polyphones and Sodomites' concludes with a gem of a discussion to accompany the perverse musicality of Chaucer's summoner and 'his freend and his compeer' the pardoner.

The sonorous potential of the body in biblical hermeneutics also leads to considering the discourse of musicality in the pain of bodies suffering under torture or as martyrs. Thirteenth century Latin religious texts (from a Low Countries friar, an English Franciscan later Archbishop of Canterbury, and two of the visionary nuns of Helfta) are examined as 'The Musical Body in Pain: passion, percussion, and melody'. Music-making was also allied with violence and bodily suffering in the pedagogical disciplines of the liturgical chant-schools. When Chaucer's clergeon with his 'throte kut unto [the] nekke boon...